My tour of the SDCC

The Saab Development Center for Car Recycling, or SDCC, is a truly special place for the Saab enthusiast to visit. There, it’s possible to dream of one day getting a shipping crate and filling it to the brim with rare Saab bits made from unobtainium, carting the whole lot home and just…… loving them and caring for them. Most will have to be content with looking at the pictures, however, as a good long look around the SDCC can be hard to come by. They have a shopfront nowadays and that’s about as far as most people get. I should mention at this point that they have a new name, too, ANA Used Parts. They also deal in Opel, Chevy and Cadillac bits. But who cares about that? It’s the Saab bits we’re after, and there are millions of them! The SDCC was the brainchild of the guy reputed to be Saab’s most expensive employee – Alf Persson. Alf was the former head of crash testing at Saab, has wrecked thousands of vehicles over the years and has a habit of leaving one pin standing when he’s tenpin bowling. Nowadays, he and the SDCC crew pull them apart a little more gently. Alf also runs ANA Specialbilar, fitting out custom Saab vehicles for special uses such as police, etc. We’ll take a close look at a Saab 9-5 police vehicle in another entry. Please note that all of the photos in this entry have been uploaded to my Picasa gallery. There’s more there, too. Around the back of the SDCC, you’re greeted with a massive carpark full of Saabs (and a few other lurkers) waiting to be dismantled.

Cars can be at the end of their useful life, involved in accidents, flooded…… whatever reason. There must have been at least 80 there in the yard when I visited, from old 900s and 9000s to 9-3s and 9-5s from as recent as 2008 or 2009. You can see a few orange vehicles in the photo, below. They’re Saab crash test vehicles, for example. We’ll take a closer look at a few of the cars in the carpark later.

In the workshop, the cars are dismantled piece by piece and the useful parts are then catalogued and stored in the warehouses, grouped together by part/panel type and model. They have a team rebuilding large parts for resale there. Here we see a couple of engines on stands getting reconditioned prior to being sent out to live another day.

The size and scope of the warehouse is difficult to comprehend and even more difficult to photograph. You just can’t get everything into the shot because there’s so much of it. Hopefully the next few photos will give you an idea, though, of the sheer volume of stuff that’s warehoused here. Those who have seen an SDCC sale at the Saab festival and marveled at the range of stuff on offer……. you ain’t seen the half of it! Some dashboards and radiators/intercoolers……

As you can see, it really is mind-boggling to walk through this place and see all the stuff they’ve got there. I could have quite easily taken home about a dozen sets of Saab wheels from that collection and barely made a dent on the stocks.SDCCANA Used Parts don’t just hoard this stuff for the pleasure of doing so and they don’t save it up for big sales at Saab Festivals. They have a shopfront on site and they also sell worldwide via phone and the internet. If you’re looking for a hard-to-find part, they’re definitely worth a try. They’ve forgotten more about Saabs then what most of us will ever know. Here are a few parts out in the yard that the public can just rock up and purchase. A full 9-3 Aero 5-door interior for 4,000SEK, for example….. and yes, that’s a C900 rear quarter hanging from the fence 🙂

—— There are some cars that come in that for whatever reason, don’t have their exterior parts rescued for later use. These ones meet their fate in the crusher and it’s always sad to see them stacked up like this:

——My thanks to Alf Persson and Martin at SDCC for the tour around the site, and to Dave R for arranging it. We had an amazing time with Alf and crew, both that day and that evening. Another one of those unforgettable Saab experiences that I’ve been extremely fortunate to have thanks to the generosity of others.

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